News

Scientists from Oxford University and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory have completed a painstaking mapping of one of the most exotic places in the universe found close to absolute zero. The ‘quantum spin liquid’ is a strange state of matter whose existence was proposed in the 1970s but which has only been observed recently. Until now, there has been extremely limited information available describing its physical characteristics.

Oxford researchers Peter Babkevich, D. Prabhakaran and Andrew Boothroyd, together with Paul Freeman from Berlin, have uncovered new evidence that dynamic stripe fluctuations play an important role in the copper oxide high temperature superconductors. Their results, which appeared in Nature magazine on 17 March, will assist the search for a mechanism of high temperature superconductivity.